Terence Stamp interview for Song for Marion: 'My life wouldn't suit everyone'

Terence Stamp talks to John Preston about his new film Song for Marion and why
he's happy alone.

Terence Stamp’s career has not followed a conventional course – nor, I’d better point out at the start, does my interview with him. It begins on top of an air conditioning unit and ends in a penthouse. At one stage both of us will remove a shoe and Stamp will also sing a verse from the Kinks’ classic Waterloo Sunset. If this last part strikes you as a little self-indulgent, bear in mind that he has every right to – after all, it was written about him.

For the time being, though, let us join him in the lobby of a West End hotel where Stamp cuts a distinctive figure among the other guests. At 74, Stamp’s hair may be whiter – and thinner – than it once was but otherwise he’s aged remarkably well. “Bone structure,” he says disinterestedly by way of explanation. “My father had it, too.” A famously elegant dresser, today he’s wearing a pale brown corduroy suit and a white shirt with unbuttoned cuffs. However, it’s not just his looks and his clothes that make him stand out. He is also the only person in the place who’s completely still, not moving a muscle as he stares at all the frenetic comings and goings around him.

If age hasn’t dimmed him physically, it’s done nothing to dim his curiosity either. It soon becomes clear that Stamp is one of those people whose interest can be engaged by almost anything. It’s not just the other people in the hotel lobby who fascinate him; it’s the vases of flowers, the marble-topped tables, the luggage carts… In the few seconds it takes for the lift to whisk us up to where our interview is due to take place, he even bends down to study the buttons on the control panel. But when we sit down and try to talk, the roar from the air conditioning unit almost drowns out Stamp’s whispery voice. Rather nervously, in case he insists on staying put, I ask him if he’d mind if we went somewhere quieter. Stamp, though, is completely unfazed. “I couldn’t give a toss where we go,” he says, putting his arm around my shoulder. “Let’s travel…” Following a consultation with the management, we are shown into an enormous penthouse with sweeping views over the rooftops of London.

Stamp gazes around rubbing his hands in delight. “Oh yes! This is more like it.” He’s quite an expert on hotel rooms, it turns out, having spent much of his life in them. When I ask him where he lives now, he looks a bit nonplussed and says: “Well, I don’t really live anywhere. I stay with friends a lot, or just travel about from hotel to hotel.” But where is his home? “Home?” he repeats — the word sitting awkwardly on his tongue. “Oh, I don’t have one. Haven’t done for years.” Like his bone structure, Stamp’s restless nature probably comes from his father. Thomas Stamp was a stoker – later a tugboat captain – who spent much of his life steaming up and down the Thames while his wife stayed at home looking after their six children.

Neither, it seems safe to say, ever imagined that their son would become a film star – in those days, working-class boys from Stepney simply didn’t do things like that. Stamp, though, was always an unusual child – aged 11, he asked his mother to perm his hair. “Oh yes, that’s quite true. She did a very good job, too.”

By then, he’d already had what proved to be the defining experience of his life. When he was four, his mother took him to see Gary Cooper in Beau Geste at their local cinema. “Literally, everything changed in that moment. More than anything else in the world, I wanted to be like Gary Cooper. But it never occurred to me to say anything about it because that sort of life wasn’t open to people like me. It was just this secret dream. Whenever I could, I went to the movies as a kid; they were really the only light in this otherwise very bleak existence.”

For much of Stamp’s childhood, his father was away in the War. When he came back, the atmosphere at home suddenly became more strained. “My impression is that he took one look at me and thought, well, his mother’s really f----- him up. He used to call me Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

Stamp’s father is much on his mind today – and for a very good reason. In his new film, Song for Marion, he effectively plays him. His character, Arthur, is a sardonic, emotionally constipated working-class man who has to learn to cope after his wife (played by Vanessa Redgrave) dies of cancer.

Initially, Stamp had reservations about doing the part, he says – mainly because he couldn’t see how to make it work. “Then I saw that I could base my performance on my father and that might do it…” He breaks off and stares at the back of his hand – he has oddly flat fingernails that look as if they’ve been caught in a trouser-press. “It’s a strange experience; playing your own father, you know. And what made it stranger still is that I never really knew what he thought of me. I think he was proud, but he’d never have dreamed of saying so.”

Partly due to his spending every spare moment in the cinema, Stamp grew up both reserved and solitary. He was also, he insists, completely blind to the gifts that nature had bestowed on him. “I never imagined I was good- looking or attractive or anything like that,” he says – although this doesn’t sit entirely convincingly with him asking his mother to perm his hair.

Stamp says he and his mother “spent a lot of time together, often listening to the radio.” And it was on the radio that he first heard mention of a place called Albany, the Georgian apartment complex just off Piccadilly in the middle of the West End. “I asked my mother what it was and she said, ‘Oh, it’s where the posh people live.’” From then on, Albany assumed an almost mystical dimension in Stamp’s life – not just a symbol of success, but of social exclusivity, too.

When, aged 16, he was working as a messenger boy in Cheapside, Stamp was once given a package addressed to Albany. “I remember going there giving it to this guy in a top hat. He was standing by this open door and through it I could see this amazing vista. And I had this feeling that if I could step inside, something magical would happen. That I’d somehow be transformed. And then this guy in the top hat closed the door.”

Shortly afterwards, he started acting in amateur groups. “But I was s---,” he says. “I really was. I couldn’t learn the words or anything. It was a nightmare.” He can’t have been that bad, though, because he ended up getting a scholarship to Webber Douglas drama school. Soon after he left, he was picked to play the lead in Peter Ustinov’s film of Billy Budd. The film was a big hit and all at once Stamp was famous, part of a new breed of working-class actors like Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole and Michael Caine – with whom Stamp shared a flat for a while.

How did that feel, I wonder; being a good-looking, famous young man in the Swinging Sixties? Surely it can’t have been all bad? “Oh no! A lot of the time it was just fantastic. On the other hand, I was never into all the drink and drugs. I tried them, of course, but all the time I was thinking to myself, ‘I’ve got to give this my best shot.’ Going out and getting p----- and falling down, that just wasn’t for me. Apart from anything else, all the others were so good, you know, Finney, O’Toole… I couldn’t just stroll on after a brandy like them. I needed to be as clear-headed as I could.”

Although he may have steered clear of drink and drugs, Stamp was a lot less abstemious when it came to women. Among his many girlfriends was the model Jean Shrimpton. “We had this flat in Mount Street and we had this friend who was a decorator. I happened to mention to him that I’d really like to get into Albany. A few days later I got an invitation to tea from John Richardson [the Picasso biographer]. As I was leaving, I said to him, “Listen man, if anything comes up here, let me know.’ A few weeks later – bingo!”

Soon, Stamp – now the proud lessee of a “set” in Albany – was mixing with an entirely different crowd to the one he’d been brought up with. At one stage he found himself listening to Princess Margaret telling how, as a teenager, she used to have sexual fantasies about the workmen she saw out of the Buckingham Palace windows.

There were other changes, too – by this time the wheel in his bedroom had turned and Jean Shrimpton had made way for Julie Christie. It was while Stamp was going out with Christie that Ray Davies wrote Waterloo Sunset.

“My brother Chris [who was managing The Who] was very friendly with Ray, and he happened to mention one day that he’d written a song with me and Julie in it.” In a strong tuneful voice – in contrast to his flat, still faintly Cockney speaking voice – Stamp starts to sing, “Terry meets Julie/ Waterloo Station/ Every Friday night… Beautiful, isn’t it? Always makes me feel funny when I hear it.”

But all the while the Sixties were drawing to a close, – and so, too, although Stamp didn’t realise it at the time, was his career. After a couple of flops at the start of the Seventies, he suddenly found no one would touch him.

Rather than stick around and repine, Stamp – who’d always had a very intense, ascetic side – went off to an ashram in India.

He ended up staying there for nine years. “In the back of my head, I never completely gave up on acting. But after a while I thought it was never going to happen. And that was fine; I was really very happy in the ashram. I felt I’d enriched myself in a way that I could never have done elsewhere.”

Then one morning he was having breakfast in a hotel near the ashram. “By now, I had a beard and I hadn’t cut my hair in God knows how long. The concierge says, ‘Mr Terence, we’ve got a cable for you.’ And he drags out this grimy, dog-eared envelope addressed to ‘Clarence Stamp’. I remember opening the envelope, and there was a tremor in my hand. I think I knew that my life was about to change.” Inside was a telegram offering Stamp a part in the first two Superman films. He got straight on a flight, came back to London and was driven to the studio where filming was about to start.

“I didn’t even have any chance to buy any clothes and I was still in my orange robes from the ashram. Almost the first thing that happened was Marlon Brando came up to me, took hold of my robe and said, ‘What have you been up to then?’” In one sense, Stamp was back – although he wasn’t under any illusions about his prospects. “I knew I wasn’t a leading man any more. At the time I thought of my looks as going, but they were just changing. Even so, I was getting on a bit. I thought if I could become a character actor, do the occasional thing, that would be fine.”

He had also come to realise something else about himself. Children, house, commitment, stability… none of it was for him. “Perhaps I’d known that from the start, although maybe I hadn’t acknowledged it. I always saw myself as a kind of strolling player, travelling about, and that was part of the price of the trip, as far as I was concerned.”

He’d learnt, too, that he could manage without money. “I didn’t really need it – or not much of it anyway. Being in the ashram taught me that. And at various times, I’ve literally run out. There was a time in the Nineties when I didn’t have the money for a bus fare once. But fortunately I’d bought all this white wine, Chateau d’Yquem, in the Sixties. I hadn’t drunk much of it, so, whenever things got tight, I could sell a case and that would tide me over.”

For the past 30 years, ever since he gave up his flat in Albany, Stamp has led this strange nomadic existence. Although he’s worked quite a lot – in films like The Limey, Wall Street, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Valkyrie – he’s never planned ahead, nor stayed in one place for long.

Does he know where he’s going to be in, say, a month’s time? “I really don’t,” he says. “I have good chums all over the place, so I just pick up on what’s happening. And if no one is around I’ll just go off to another hotel. Home is where my head is.”

Does he ever get lonely? “Yeah! Definitely. I spend an inordinate amount of time on my own. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes it’s not. I’m always happy for the phone to ring, though, and someone to invite me to dinner.”

Then, in 2003, Stamp did something quite uncharacteristic: he got married – to an Australian pharmacist 35 years his junior. But it didn’t last: after five years his wife divorced him for unreasonable behaviour – he won’t say what went wrong – and Stamp packed his suitcase and moved on.

It can’t be easy not having a home, I say, especially if you care as much about clothes as he does. “Well, I keep things in different people’s houses. Also, it’s not as if I’m changing my wardrobe all the time. I tend to hang on to stuff for as long as possible. Take these shoes for instance. They were specially made for me years ago by this brilliant man called George Cleverley.”

Leaning forward, Stamp stares at my shoes. “I like those,” he says. “I’ve always had a thing about suede brogues. Cost a bit, though, I bet.” When I tell him I bought them from a website for £39.95, Stamp becomes very excited indeed. “That’s amazing. Can I have a look?”

So it is that we sit on the carpet and I show him my shoe and he shows me his. Stamp points at his stockinged foot. “Unfortunately, I have to get all my shoes made for me as I have this very long middle toe on my left foot. Evidence of my Neanderthal past.” He laughs. “Probably explains a lot about me.”

“There’s something else I want to ask,” I say.

“About shoes?”

“No, not about shoes. About getting older. I wonder how you feel about being 74?”

“Not at all bad, actually,” he says. “I’m much more at ease with myself than I was, say, in my twenties. Of course, I’d love to have a head of black hair like I did then, but you can’t have everything. You see, I have the life that suits me. It wouldn’t suit everyone, I know, but it does suit me.

“And there’s something else, too, a lot of the dreams that I had – they’ve been realised. I mean, there aren’t that many people who can say that, are there?”

With that, he picks up my shoe and looks at it again, turning it over in his hands like a piece of porcelain. It seems an appropriate place to leave him somehow. A singular man with one shoe on and one shoe off, striding happily towards an uncertain future.